psuche

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TijgerlelieWijnhard
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psuche

Post by TijgerlelieWijnhard »

Would anyone be so kind to describe what the ancient Greek concept of the so called ‘psuche‘ is all about? I can’t quite put my finger on it.
    EchoesOfTheHorizon
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    Re: psuche

    Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

    Not all conceptions of the soul from antiquity is equitable, they operated off of medical theories that wasn't body based as we have since the renaissance. Winds had a effect from heaven and body, in a manner not the same but not to dissimilar to how the heavens in astrology could dictate the movements and thus health of the body.

    It was the dualistic sense of self, separate from the body, a force of wind. Thales wouldn't be aligned with this theory, he was more interested in water as the root elementary force. You have to be careful here when digging about, trying to assert a universal ideology, different schools of thought existed, and they mixed not just what we would call medical concepts with mythological, but also foreign mythologies, from older civilizations as well as local religions.

    You should balance this concept as well with concepts of soul and breath in the Upanishads, who went through a similar evolution of asserting who's system had priority (neither east or west outright denounced systems of physics in this era as far as I could see, just sat competing theories as lower on the scale of casual origination of being, dependent upon their preferred concepts) as well as China which was a society with deep beliefs in the movements of the winds upon health and body. Their early medicine looked like a meteorological forecast.

    China isn't nearly as isolated as we presume, I've been doing a lot of work in this area, since he early Zhou Persia and China, since just prior to Confucius, made contacts (I'm presuming Zoroastrianism out of Xinjiang) so it likely was carrier through this intermediary. I'm also finding evidence that the modern corpus of the Zoroastrian religion is but a thin echo of what it once was, I'm going through identifying myths spoken of in china or the west, they are much decayed, simplified, but also present in the religion.

    To these beliefs the sense of self is your identity and essence. In Christianity, as well as our older Mandaean faith that Saint John the Baptist arose out of, it is Water like with Thales. Why we are always baptizing people, though emergency baptisms allow for breath in extreme circumstances when water isn't available. Ancients would of known of the parity of the concepts as far as equating the meaning, and would of taken minimum offense at worst. I'm guessing a lot of these concepts are still buried in modern languages, but simply don't care enough to do the search for it.

    At the same time, don't presume the average person in antiquity grasped the difference, and just had a ignorant mumble jumbo belief system, hearing these epics on occasion, doing hard labor, and dying of sickness or injury at a young age. The people willing to debate these schools existed of course, we have record of some of them, but they would of been a extreme minority of the population in this age. Greeks especially were all over the place, and at times the sense of self resembled more a ghost as we would have today. It wasn't a single systematic system, just like the belief in the concept of the soul today isn't singularly tied down to any one concept. You'll get atheists like Searl trying to be clever and denounce aspects of certain beliefs, but some held similar beliefs to his (renaissance didn't invent the body as the soul) and the one' she denounce tend to be far more complex and valid in aspects than he is willing to give credit to. I would mark the proper approach to these definitions as seeing it as a anthromorphic theory of mind, indicates how they saw how the mind worked, and I focus more on that than anything else. These poets tended to have a certain scientific mindset, and it isn't completely invalidated, if we invalifpdated them, we would have to likewise chuck a big section of our modern physics down the drain too, as they are built on comparibly shaky ground involving perception, causality, and being. Later eras are going to mock us without mercy I'm afraid, but a good historian will decipher how we saw the world, how it relates to earlier eras, and how the future modern mind still insists on thinking of things in the absurd patterns used in the 21st century. History shall not be kind to us, but it should have the integrity to respect us for who we actually are. We are complicated, and diverse. Antiquity for us should be viewed similarly. Know the people were no less dynamic, not as well educated, but they had senses like us, questions like us, lived in cities who had quite similar elements to our own. The modes of modern government and life existed then in scrambled parts.... don't write them off on the big questions just cause they are old, and you like the snide remarks of a Richard Dawkins. You'll lose a lot of insight if you take this approach, and I see too many idiots taking a cursory tramp across a concept of history and take very little away save their own projection of ignorance upon those long dead, all in a effort to come off as advanced. I'm equally annoyed by too strong of a advocacy stretched well beyond the facts.
    TijgerlelieWijnhard
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    Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2016 10:43 pm
    Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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    Re: psuche

    Post by TijgerlelieWijnhard »

    EchoesOfTheHorizon wrote: Thu Nov 09, 2017 4:53 pm Not all conceptions of the soul from antiquity is equitable, they operated off of medical theories that wasn't body based as we have since the renaissance. Winds had a effect from heaven and body, in a manner not the same but not to dissimilar to how the heavens in astrology could dictate the movements and thus health of the body.

    It was the dualistic sense of self, separate from the body, a force of wind. Thales wouldn't be aligned with this theory, he was more interested in water as the root elementary force. You have to be careful here when digging about, trying to assert a universal ideology, different schools of thought existed, and they mixed not just what we would call medical concepts with mythological, but also foreign mythologies, from older civilizations as well as local religions.

    You should balance this concept as well with concepts of soul and breath in the Upanishads, who went through a similar evolution of asserting who's system had priority (neither east or west outright denounced systems of physics in this era as far as I could see, just sat competing theories as lower on the scale of casual origination of being, dependent upon their preferred concepts) as well as China which was a society with deep beliefs in the movements of the winds upon health and body. Their early medicine looked like a meteorological forecast.

    China isn't nearly as isolated as we presume, I've been doing a lot of work in this area, since he early Zhou Persia and China, since just prior to Confucius, made contacts (I'm presuming Zoroastrianism out of Xinjiang) so it likely was carrier through this intermediary. I'm also finding evidence that the modern corpus of the Zoroastrian religion is but a thin echo of what it once was, I'm going through identifying myths spoken of in china or the west, they are much decayed, simplified, but also present in the religion.

    To these beliefs the sense of self is your identity and essence. In Christianity, as well as our older Mandaean faith that Saint John the Baptist arose out of, it is Water like with Thales. Why we are always baptizing people, though emergency baptisms allow for breath in extreme circumstances when water isn't available. Ancients would of known of the parity of the concepts as far as equating the meaning, and would of taken minimum offense at worst. I'm guessing a lot of these concepts are still buried in modern languages, but simply don't care enough to do the search for it.

    At the same time, don't presume the average person in antiquity grasped the difference, and just had a ignorant mumble jumbo belief system, hearing these epics on occasion, doing hard labor, and dying of sickness or injury at a young age. The people willing to debate these schools existed of course, we have record of some of them, but they would of been a extreme minority of the population in this age. Greeks especially were all over the place, and at times the sense of self resembled more a ghost as we would have today. It wasn't a single systematic system, just like the belief in the concept of the soul today isn't singularly tied down to any one concept. You'll get atheists like Searl trying to be clever and denounce aspects of certain beliefs, but some held similar beliefs to his (renaissance didn't invent the body as the soul) and the one' she denounce tend to be far more complex and valid in aspects than he is willing to give credit to. I would mark the proper approach to these definitions as seeing it as a anthromorphic theory of mind, indicates how they saw how the mind worked, and I focus more on that than anything else. These poets tended to have a certain scientific mindset, and it isn't completely invalidated, if we invalifpdated them, we would have to likewise chuck a big section of our modern physics down the drain too, as they are built on comparibly shaky ground involving perception, causality, and being. Later eras are going to mock us without mercy I'm afraid, but a good historian will decipher how we saw the world, how it relates to earlier eras, and how the future modern mind still insists on thinking of things in the absurd patterns used in the 21st century. History shall not be kind to us, but it should have the integrity to respect us for who we actually are. We are complicated, and diverse. Antiquity for us should be viewed similarly. Know the people were no less dynamic, not as well educated, but they had senses like us, questions like us, lived in cities who had quite similar elements to our own. The modes of modern government and life existed then in scrambled parts.... don't write them off on the big questions just cause they are old, and you like the snide remarks of a Richard Dawkins. You'll lose a lot of insight if you take this approach, and I see too many idiots taking a cursory tramp across a concept of history and take very little away save their own projection of ignorance upon those long dead, all in a effort to come off as advanced. I'm equally annoyed by too strong of a advocacy stretched well beyond the facts.
    You touched a lot of interesting facets I was unfamiliar with in this expansion, thank you.
    EchoesOfTheHorizon
    Posts: 356
    Joined: Mon Oct 23, 2017 6:08 am

    Re: psuche

    Post by EchoesOfTheHorizon »

    We still do this, by the way. We build on older physics, but add to it with theories of expansive consciousness.

    The movie Intersteller is very much along this vein:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iJio07EtKYc

    That's the scene when he left "normal space", which only arose to us from the debates starting with the pre-Socratics, and then entered into a black hole, where physics as we accept it doesn't seemingly exist, so they pulled out some 19th Century dimensional presumptions like you'll see in a book "Flatland" and made concepts of time and space play around it, in a higher realm of physics that had more reality than a anthromophized, angry global warming world of the liberal today.

    This sort of thing pops up in a lot of places, so it is important when you look over the early works, don't knock them for being primitive, they can be remarkably advanced at times. The culture around Science had taken the same point of lucridity as Lucian of Samosata did in his True History, where he took many of the craziest concepts people had about space in Roman times and made it into a epic space opera like Star Wars (not kidding about this). We kinda maintained this mindset up till the present, in our approach to the realm of nature, didn't hesitate to knock anything that went against the most trusted work, but made the activities of heaven and hell open to anything. Now, we pump out questionable realms of reality for science to fill about once every decade, be it on the micro or macro scale, or in another dimension.... just so long as you can't possibly prove it except through the most absurd and thinnest of evidence. Everyone jumps on board of theories like String Theory or Dark Matter, multiple universes, etc. We stick to the harder sciences so long as it is useful and empirically verified, but then slap on a whole bunch of wackiness, and it is conditioned on so much that is questionable.

    The pre-Socratics wasn't a dead end, or a precursor to modern physics, but rather a indicator of just how flimsy the evidence can get, and how ready we are to embrace thin theories, even today. We all do it. We get uncomfortable at times with it, but it goes away when we see awesome artist renderings of black holes and ask what is inside. Seems to be the mark of the human condition. That tesseract in that clip is a very advanced form of a psuche..... the daughter somehow knew it was him on some level, he acted like the wind. Wind inside a black hole, the one damn place in physics you can act out irrational fantasies like this and still pass yourself off as a rational atheist. It is because we are so irrational whenever we assert our rationality. Can't get rid of the one when you assert the other.
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